I

know for a lot of our audience members, when we think of therapy, we think of our personal relationships. We don't often think about therapy with our job. But over the years, we have developed a stronger and stronger relationship with work, being 24 -7, being always on, it taking up so much of our lives. So tell us a little bit about the impetus for your latest book, Job Therapy.

Yeah. So when I started thinking about job therapy and by way of background, I'm a relationship scientist. I kind of came at this after 20 years of studying romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, you know, all kinds of relationships. And I realized the way that people talk about their job is much more like the way they talk about a romantic partner that they're annoyed with. You know, and I'm not just talking to people at work, like a boss or coworker. I'm talking about the actual career. You know, I feel ambivalent about you. I used to love you and now I hate you. And some days you make me feel good about myself and other days you made me feel really terrible about myself, but I can't leave you because you're such a core part of who I am. And I think these complicated feelings we have with our careers, the ambivalence, the emotional roller coaster that we're often on, are things that people have a hard time grappling with and they don't feel like they have a very good game plan of how to deal with that, especially the angst that comes along with that relationship, the boredom, the ennui that we feel, the existential crises we have. These are all things that we're used to in marriages that are falling apart or even relationships with aging parents, but careers, not so much. We don't talk about them in the same kind of way. So I thought it would be useful to kind of use all that background I have in the twists and turns of relationships and apply it to the one we have with our career.

Well, I was showing a little bit before we got started, our journeys mirror each other quite a bit. So starting the show, looking at romantic over 17 years ago, many of our clients then were coming to us purely for advice around finding that partner. And then it's grown and shifted to enhancing their social life and growing their personal network. And now we're seeing more and more, especially as we've shifted from the pandemic around this rise of unhappiness with their career, looking for professional networking advice, how to grow their network to ultimately find that next secure role for them. And a lot of us feel like we don't have those opportunities. We know that people and relationships create those opportunities. So that's often why they end up on our doorstep to take our executive coaching programs to find happiness either in their current role or make that big leap. And one of the things I hear time and time again is this ambiguity aversion. So the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. And the fear that no matter how bad their job is currently and how unhappy they are, the fear of starting over, trying something new, going to something that is, again, very scary, ambiguous, and leads us to stay in a situation we're unhappy with.

Yeah, I'd say kind of one of the biggest issues people face is uncertainty. And for people who are experts, they've been doing something well for a long time. They might hate it, but they know what they're doing, and they know how to be successful, and they're probably charge of other people. There's another layer to this, which is shame and embarrassment. Walking in as a newbie when they are used to being in charge, used to being the person others come to for information. And a lot of people come to me and they say, you know, I'm doing this career transition. I finally bit the bullet. I did it. And I'm older than everybody else by 25 years or my boss is the same age as my kid, and I feel really silly about that because I used to be in the C -suite or whatever. And there's this embarrassment that they don't want to talk about, that there's a status loss, a status threat, that I think people grapple with, but they don't want to talk about because it makes them sound a little bit entitled or spoiled. They don't know who the right audience is to complain about that, but it's a real feeling. And then just kind of, you know, how does that knowledge that you have from an old career transfer over into a new one, how much of that knowledge transfer is really your responsibility to figure out and how much of it is it the people in the new workplace for them to kind of handhold and do that knowledge transferring for you, and people simply don't know the norms around that. Like, is it okay to ask this thing or that thing? Or is there some kind of guidebook or handbook so I'm not chronically emailing the person next to me? You know, like, hey, who do I email to get a new ID? Because mine won't let me in the building. You know, you feel silly doing these things. And enough of those add up and you feel too scared to just take the leap. don't want to do it. It's uncomfortable. So you just stay.

And you make a great point that so many of us even use the analogy that our work is a ladder. We're trying to climb the ladder and we're just looking for the next rung ahead of us. And often I'll talk to clients, it's actually shoots and ladders. You got to find the next ladder that allows you to grow faster and get to that other rung. And sometimes it means taking a step back. It means taking a lower position, losing a title, losing people that you're managing and going back to an IC role. And that can, as you said, be very intimidating. That status loss, sharing with friends and family who thought outside looking in that you had gained all of these riches in your career that deep down internally you're not happy with. Yeah,

I think this idea that you have to take some lateral moves or down moves to climb up eventually is at least in America this just isn't something we're taught or we we don't have a muscle for it we don't have a tolerance for that and people come to me all the time they say you know I told my parents who are immigrants that I'm doing this and they think I'm nuts you know or you know how long it took us to save for your college and now you're throwing that degree away or spouses that say, we moved to this city for you. So you get a lot of negative social pressure from the people that you care about to not do these things. And I think that guilt is one of the big drivers of this. I think, you know, I talk a lot about, in my book, Job Therapy, about people who struggle to get promoted and And one of the main reasons why is what you just talked about. They've actually missed these steps along the way, maybe not one role ago, but two or three roles ago, that there's an implicit norm that you learn things during those roles that you're going to need for this thing that's like three or four roles above it. And no one told you. And no one's even telling you that's not why you're getting promoted. So I'd say sometimes just like, you know, taking that step of submitting to yourself, you've missed something is really important for actually climbing up and then figuring out what those missteps are and that kind of game of shoots and ladders. But it can't be a really kind of scary and sometimes humiliating and negative social experience to go through.

I think for a lot of us, when we think about our career there's this narrowing of focus as well with the skill set and We either look for the role to force collaboration or we just keep doing the job in front of us and actually for our younger audience members I highly encourage them to seek collaboration as much as possible as early in their career as possible because that creates the network and the opportunities for you to be exposed to all of these different norms that are going to be so valuable later in your career. And I talked to clients who, yes, they've managed a team, but they haven't worked with entirely different parts of the business. They've only driven outcomes in their little neck of the woods, and now they're trying to make a move that requires them collaborating across teams and across departments to drive even larger outcomes, but they've had no exposure

to those other departments, the nomenclature, the jargon, how they operate. Yeah, I'd say there's a, you hit on so many important points, but I think, you know, this idea that you're not learning skills, you're not learning norms and jargon, you know, when you're siloed off in an organization and people get more bespoke and more narrow as they climb up is absolutely true. The other problem that can happen is you become really good at a local thing that just doesn't translate well on a resume. So, it is so narrow and it's so idiosyncratic to my organization that when I put it on a resume, other organizations looking at that are like, I don't know what that means. What does it mean that you contributed like 300% growth in this really narrow thing? I don't know what 300% even means. And it becomes too narrow. And we see this in academia when people publish on something super, super narrow and no one cites them and they're like, why doesn't everyone love all my work on yeast? I don't get it. It's too narrow, not enough people care about it. And then another kind of flaw of that kind of narrow focus and your stuff not translating outside of the organization on your resume is you don't know who you're actually being compared to because you're used to making all these really like narrow local comparisons within your job for raises and promotions. And you have no idea who the relevant comparison to other is for when you go on the market. And that requires networking and talking to people and saying, I'm really good at this thing. Does the world even care about that thing? And if you get nine out of 10 people going, I don't even know what that thing is. I've never really heard of it. You're talking about it like it's universal, but I think it's only the northeast corner of your office that cares about that. And I'm shocked at how often people don't realize that things that they've spent 20 years becoming an expert on are just not valued in the industry anymore. Or there's a shift and they just haven't really caught up to that.

Yeah, I know what we've seen as well is then that exact point of translating all of that onto a resume that's actually applicable for other roles in other companies. Oftentimes when you get so focused and narrowed, you're only thinking about driving outcomes at your company. Well, it becomes very easy for you to list them off, but what does that mean in another industry? What does that mean for an entirely different company? And how is that actually going to get you an interview? But I'd love to start with the just really the five key drivers that you outline in the book. And I know you have specific questions and exercises we could walk through. But I know as we go along, we're going to have audience members nodding along saying, Yeah, that's me. Oh, that's a little bit of me too. Okay. I got to make some changes.

Yeah. So when I sat down to write this book, I wanted to go for what are those psychological tensions we're experiencing at work, not so much the structural issues around the workplace, but what are we really feeling in our relationship with our career? So I started with the big one, having a crisis of identity. And I think for those of us who've been around long enough, we know what it feels like to spend months and years honing a set of skills. And, you know, you might still be identified with that, but it's not really bringing you much satisfaction anymore. In fact, you're really good at this thing that you kind of hate doing day in and day out. And so having that crisis of identity, the big question you have to ask yourself is, is this, do I need to take a completely different leap? Or, you know, am I really okay with this career path? I perhaps just need to go elsewhere. And that's a big existential jump, I think that people have to kind of, you know make to get to that next step. The next one is is feeling drifted apart so if you've ever been in a relationship with a human or maybe an animal actually you loved your dog now you don't um and they they're different than when you first got together and You know, you know what you want you recognize it from the past, but you're not seeing it in your current position now and It's tricky to know what has changed and why and so there might be a million little things that are contributing to you drifting apart From your particular job. Maybe you've changed. You don't quite know. And so kind of figuring out what those changes are and whether they're specific to your job or to the whole industry and whether that past version of your job even exists anymore is an important question these people have to ask themselves. So the next one is feeling stretched too thin. And I really kind of do this and focus on two different things. The first is, you're doing a whole bunch of roles that you think are useful that probably aren't. I think one thing people do who are really ambitious at work is they take on volunteer roles because they think it will help them get ahead. I think I found people spend like 11 hours a week doing these things that bosses actually don't care about. No one really talks about and taking on other people's work. So these visible, you know, running an employee resource group type things, or passion roles that don't actually help them get ahead. The other is more of a daily issue that I think probably every listener is going to have some experience with, which is just task switching, this kind of disease we have in society right now of just constantly going from one thing to another, having our phones out, you know, and trying to figure out how to be more effective at work to kind of prevent that problem from creeping into your productivity. And this kind of goes down to like basic neuroscience of how memories are formed and how we disrupt that process. It's kind of shocking. You don't form real memories when you task switch. It turns out the reason why you can't remember you're doing is because you never encoded it in the first place. So kind of figuring out some life hacks around that. And then the last two are really around people who are struggling to get ahead. So one is the runner up. That person who is just chronically coming in second place. There seems to be a lack of clear feedback, at least according to them on as to why. For the record, people who succeed at getting promotions still don't actually really know why. I think in my data around 60% of them weren't really told why they were promoted. So there's just kind of a real black hole when it comes to figuring out what to do to get ahead. And then the last group are underappreciated stars. And these are people who think they're pretty awesome. They think they have some unique skill at work that not everybody has. I try to get people to interrogate that a little because I think labeling yourself as a star is probably a misstep for most of us. And they're valued, but they're not compensated in the way they want. And I think, you know, for them, there's a lot of companies that will dangle carrots in front of them. Like, you you're gonna get a huge bonus, we just need to raise two more million, and then you know, then it's gonna happen for you, or after the layoffs, I promise things are gonna get better for you. So, so people tell you you're great, but they don't compensate you for it. And their biggest challenge is figuring out whether their star status actually matters in the world, because I think most of the time, good enough is just fine for most organizations and getting over that hump. It's like the difference between being a man who's on the dating market and being 6 '1 versus 6 '1 .5". Does that happen to actually help you get more dates? Probably not because 6 '1 is good. For people who are like tall people. There's just kind of a... There's incremental value at some point in having these additional things. Yeah, so those are those kind of five key drivers.

Well, we've talked about the rise of quiet quitting. We're now hearing about quiet vacationing. And I think a lot of us are just trying to find that balance with this tension that we're feeling. Instead of getting to the core issues, we're dealing with the symptom of, okay, well, I've seen what happens when I go 110% and the person going 80% of my output is getting promoted. So I'm going to quiet quit and just do the bare minimum. Or I'm going to quiet vacation and realize that I don't have to be in this location anymore as long as I keep hitting my targets. But at the core level, really looking at the identity piece first, I feel so many of our audience members are making this trade -off constantly around fulfillment and compensation. And all of a sudden, it really gets out of balance where the compensation has been so great, but you're getting further and further away from that fulfillment that actually drove you originally to that career path or interested you in that when you were in college of studying that. And then of course, with the financial component of that, well, there's lifestyle creep. And now you got the house, and now you got the cars, and you might be supporting a spouse or a nanny, and all of a sudden, it's very hard to go, well, I know I'm not fulfilled, but I can't give up the financial that this role is giving me.

Yeah, I think the fulfillment piece, it reminds me a lot of the research and close relationships on being embedded. And there's work on this at the workplace too. Once you become valued at work, it is up to your organization. A good organization, a good boss will make it very difficult for you to leave in a practical way. So they will make it so that you drop off your kids on the way, that the school is, you know, proximal to the workplace, that you have friends at work, that the catering is really good and the meals are super tasty, that you get a car allowance, that they pay for your phone, and then they also give you some flexibility. All that stuff we asked about during that well -being boom, those people are getting all that stuff the rest of us are begging for. They got the free gym memberships, they get four -day work weeks, so their companies are embedding them and they're compensating them and making it very difficult for them to want to leave. Are they making the work fulfilling? No, probably not. That's a deeper psychological thing. And I think what people forget is as you climb up at work and you get compensated more you don't have the same role that brought you in there in the first place that that day -to -day stuff that makes you tick that Sparks a joy or whatever it goes away and now you're managing people and you're doing a lot of administrative work and you're doing a lot Of top -down decision -making and so the job has changed completely as you've climbed up the ladder and you become a leader. So you're doing all the right things. You're getting promoted. You are now in charge of people. You're embedded at work. And so your work life and home life are a seamless, intricate web that you can't pull apart. But you're miserable because you're not doing the thing that you liked doing. And I get a lot of people in tech that do this and they say you know I'm a team leader, I have 15 people who report to me but all I want to do is code and I actually just really miss debugging code. I'm like you can go debug code for 60k you're anywhere you want and I don't want to pay that so they want the role, they want the day -to -day stuff but all the fancy stuff that comes with it that's not that job anymore the fancy you know comp jobs kind of suck and they have a lot of responsibility. And they're not that like psychologically fulfilling and for a lot of people intellectually fulfilling.

Yeah. And I think when you have so much of your identity wrapped up in the journey to get there, right? You look back fondly on all the work you did in college and then all the training you went through, the certifications to get to that advanced position. And now you're not even doing the work anymore. You're managing all the people with those great certifications. You've grown this distance between you and the actual work that was motivating you to take that role. Yeah.

I talked to a lot of people who will sort of shamefully admit that they're jealous of their direct reports. Yeah. They want do the thing that their direct reports are doing and they kind of look at them like with envy. And that's a funny place. I don't think we've ever really seen in the workplace managers talking about how they wish that they could just do what the people that they're in charge of are doing. Most of us are just trying to climb out of that or at least we think that's what we're doing. Just work a little bit harder and you'll no longer have that mean boss micromanaging you, or you'll no longer have to count widgets all day, you'll get to do something really cool and exciting. Well, what's cool and exciting on the other side is like a lot of red tape. It's a lot of administrative labor. You know, it's a lot of like, thankless meetings and non decisions being made. I mean, now I'm a full professor, I sit in a lot of these committees that are like this and everyone just looks super miserable, but they're comped more than anyone else. So I do think this, you open was talking about this grass is greener. The grass isn't greener. Like, it's just a different shade of grass and you might not love that. But it, but that's usually what comes along with more responsibility and better comp.